[P]icture the scene; my colleague and I were sitting in a Board Room waiting for a team to arrive for a dialogue in which we were going to begin to explore the behavioural dynamics playing out between them in the aftermath of one of their colleagues having committed suicide. We found ourselves completely taken aback by what sounded like an army approaching. However, there were actually only about 4 or 5 people coming down the corridor. The sound was SO loud, it was deafening. There was raucous laughter as people were cracking jokes through raised voices. The sound got louder and became more and more strident as additional people arrived. Then, once they were in the room, a seemingly relentless stream of humour ran and ran.

At the time, we read this as an expression of fear, anxiety and insecurity about what they were coming in to. They were literally terrified of being asked to talk about what was really going on for them in their team and of what might be revealed. Their fear made sense to us but their use of humour and what it actually took to help them get to a place of being able to express their fear and grief was harder to fathom and work with. In some ways it seemed so inappropriate and ghastly. With compassion and insight though, their reaction made a huge amount of sense.

There were other powerful behaviours in play too including extreme aggression towards us as the interventionists. At the peak of the perturbance, the team leader literally walked out and went home, two members of the team left the room and started verbal brawling and threatening each other outside in the corridor. It took all our skills to bring them back into the room to continue the dialogue. It also took painstaking work over time to bring everyone back together but they got there in the end and after a few more sessions there was a kind of healing that took place. However, it’s at moments like these in the role as an interventionist when the need to be greater than the greatest disturbance in the room is absolutely paramount.

Disturbance can of course often begin to manifest itself as an expression of humour as ‘noise’ that belies something deeper that is impacting on a team. We frequently see this phenomenon playing out in the corporate world in teams that are performing. When they hit a road-block or tough conversation they will often use humour. In a private sense I have thought that it’s a tool to avoid conflict or focusing on doing deeper exploration of the Self for fear that this may show a failing or be viewed as less than optimal behaviour.

If we read humour in this way, as an expression of fear or avoidance in facing the challenge to go to work on the Self, what can we do about it when it shows up in the room?

A dilemma presents itself. Do we name what we are noticing with a view to stopping it and risk being accused of not having a sense of humour or being drowned out by the noise of the rationalization that often follows, along the lines of ‘we need to have fun too you know’? Or, are there other starting places?

We propose that the ‘work to do’ is to enquire directly into the fear that is lurking in the shadows behind the behaviours that are manifesting in the room. By making fear itself the object of attention we can enable the team to talk about what is back of the humour and other ‘noise’ we are hearing that is governing their individual and collective reactions.

It can of course be really hard to talk about fear directly because teams under pressure often cling on to what they know and may find it very difficult to express any kind of vulnerability. However, offering a dialogue space can be the most helpful thing to do because of how it enables the team to go to the deepest level of fear so that they talk about what it is they are protecting. The reason for doing this is that we need to bring the deeper issues in to the room so that they can be properly seen and understood with a view to reframing them and altering their impact.